gentleridevan

Congratulations to the good folks at Culture Pilot for knocking the TEDx Houston ball outta the park on Saturday, June 12, 2010 at University of Houston’s Wortham Theater. I had the good fortune to serve on the organizing committee, and learned volumes from the group’s cool resolve, and assurance that all would go as planned. And it did.

David Crossley (Houston Tomorrow) showing off his big locally grown zucchini (Photo courtesy of Blue Lemon Photo & TEDxHouston)

Throughout each talk, the theme that stood out for me was “unlearning” as Buckminster Fuller termed it – an approach to innovation that involves dispensing of old ideas that we now know are untrue.

Cliffnotes (don’t sue me) to TEDxHouston talks:

Brené Brown (research professor and writer at the University of Houston Graduate College of Social Work)
• Humans have a neurobiological imperative for connection.
• Shame is the fear of disconnection.
• In order to have connection, one must be vulnerable, defined as “doing something that offers no guarantees.”
• People who have a strong sense of love and belonging believe they are worthy of love and belonging, and have in common: courage, compassion and connection.
• On numbing (via substances, food, prescription drugs): you cannot selectively numb emotions.

Dan Phillips (founder of Phoenix Commotion construction company that uses recycled and salvaged materials to build affordable housing)
• The first cause of waste is hardwired into our DNA– the desire for expected pattern and unity of structural features.
• Trees don’t grow in 2 x 4s, at lengths of 8, 10, and 12′.
• Standardization leads to waste.
• Apollonian / Dionysian  contradiction.
• John Paul Sartre: Human beings act differently when they know people are watching them.
• We [Westerners] have confused Maslow’s Hierarchy and put vanity at the top, but the problem of waste is worldwide

Rebecca Richards-Kortum (Stanley C. Moore Professor of Bioengineering at Rice University) & Maria Oden (Professor in the Practice of Bioengineering Education in the Department of Bioengineering at Rice University)
• 9 million children under 5 die annually because of lack of medical treatment.
• Using college students’ enthusiasm and ideas to solve global health problems.
• Students created a medical centrifuge from a salad spinner; a florescent microscope for $200 (vs. the $40k cost of a medical grade equivalent).
• And designed field backpacks for MDs to use in remote parts of the world – a kind of portable clinic made cheaply and efficiently.
• Redesigned a locally produced incubator in Malawi, made for under $100.

Stephen Kleinberg (Rice University Sociologist and Houston’s leading demographer)
• 1 million people moved to Houston between 1970-1982; abundance of jobs in the oil and gas industry.
• Houston was the city with the least industrial control: “Come on down and make some money.”
• Crash of 1983: 100,000 jobs lost.
• Industry became more diverse (medical, aeronautics, etc.). Quality of life became an issue.
• October 7, 1999: USA Today Headline: Houston, Cough Cough, We Have A Problem, Cough Cough. Air quality was worst in country.
• Environmental regulation was no longer seen as “anti-growth” but rather necessary for success.
• Changing view of prosperity in the 21st century.
• Innovation is now network-driven.
• In the space of the last 20 years, Houston has become one of the most ethnically diverse cities in the country. It is a city of majority minorities.

Mark Johnson (founder of Hometta, a collaborative of designers, architects, builders, writers and editors who have banded together to rethink and improve the way residential architecture is designed)
• With regard to the architectural mash-ups in Houston (French Chateau, Tuscan Villa, etc): “One day I’d like to go to France and see Houston ice houses.”
• First ring of suburbs built 30-40 years ago are now deteriorating; going to landfills.
• How can we reboot our value system to promote sustainable building?
• We can start by building appropriate to scale and location: authenticity.
• Look to the sustainable food movement as an example.
• Build to impress your kids; your kids won’t remember the 2″ beveled granite countertops or the 6 burner professional stainless range. They’ll remember the oak tree, the reading nook, the originality.
• Build a house with intentionality and thoughtfulness, to be passed down through the generations.
• Houston’s Beer Can House is an example of sustainable building, and the townhouses around it will be gone in 100 years, while it will still stand.

Monica Pope (award winning chef, T’afia)
• Most of my cooking career has not been about cooking;
• Through food, I search for who I am, and what I’m supposed to do.
• We say “eat where your food grows.” I say “eat at a table.”
• We need to reinvent the campfire- the place where we gather, tell stories, and eat.

Gracie Cavnar (founder Recipe for Success)
• Obesity rates in the US doubled between 1980-2000.
• As a nation, we need to lose 4.6 billion lbs.
• 41% of us will be morbidly obese by 2015. This will be the first generation that will die before their parents.
• In 2008, $147 billion was spent on medical treatment for obesity related illness.
• Recipe for Success fights marketing with marketing.
• They put kids in touch with their food from farm to plate.
• Future plan for Hope Farms: 100 acres in the shadow of downtown Houston: the largest urban farm in the world!

David Crossley (President, Houston Tomorrow)
• By 2050, Houston will reach 11 million in population. How will that population be fed?
• We live in the most diverse eco-region in North America, but are looking at a major loss of farm land, and forested area to accommodate the growing population.
• New urbanism values: balance of natural and socio-economic development.
• 47% of Americans would rather live in a different place.
• HUD/DOT/EPA have formed “Sustainable Communities Department.”
• Ebenezer Howard, Garden Cities of Tomorrow.
• James Howard Kunsler: Downscaling.
• Houston 3.0 walkable urbanism, monorail!

Mat Johnson (Author of the graphic novel, Incognegro)
• Between 1880-1930 an estimated 2400 men, women and children were murdered in the US by lynching.
• Lynching is murder by mob action (a tactic which makes prosecution difficult to impossible)
• Lynching was a form of “domestic terrorism.”
• Mention of Walter White, civil rights leader and chief investigator of lynchings.

David Eagleman (Neuroscientist and author)
• 2003, Hubble Deep Field Observation of a dark spot in the sky, revealed thousand of universes.
• What we really learn from a life in science is the vastness of our ignorance.
• The scientific temperament is one of creativity.
• We have created a false dichotomy of god vs. no god.
• I am not an agnostic, I’m a possibilian – one who makes up new narratives about why we are here.
• Doubt is an uncomfortable position but certainty is an absurd position  (In reference to quote by Voltaire, “Doubt is uncomfortable, certainty is ridiculous.”)

Listen to me! Podcast interview of Andrea Grover (curator of 29 Chains to the Moon) and Astria Suparak (director of Miller Gallery) conducted by Eric Sloss (LabA6, College of Fine Arts, Carnegie Mellon University). Find out more about the artists currently on view and their visionary schemes for the future.

Podcast Link

Miller Gallery has posted some nice photos from the mega opening reception of 29 Chains to the Moon, and the “flavor tripping” reception, 2009: A Taste Odyssey.

I also have some très casual photos from our weekend in Pittsburgh on my flickr site. Big thanks to Astria Suparak, Brett Kashmere, Hiromi Ozaki, Cesar Harada, Jon Rubin, Carol, Lilah, Margaret Cox, Erin Pische, Michael Johnson, Greg Pierce, Alisa Dix, Lowry Burgess, Bill Daniel, Mark O’Connor, and all those who tasted the Kool Aid with us.

In 1938, the visionary designer R. Buckminster Fuller wrote Nine Chains to the Moon, his radical proposal for improving the quality of life for all humankind via progressive design and maximization [1] of the world’s finite resources. The title was a metaphor for cooperation – if all of humankind stood on each other’s shoulders we could complete nine chains to the moon. Today, the population of the planet has increased more than three times to 6.7 billion (we could now complete 29 chains to the moon), and the successful distribution of energy, food, and shelter to over 9 billion humans by 2050 requires some fantastic schemes. Like Fuller’s revelation from five decades earlier, 29 Chains to the Moon features artists who put forth radical proposals, from seasteads and tree habitats to gift-based cultures, to make the world work for everyone.

Nostalgia for our alternate future is in the ether on this convergence of anniversaries: 2009 marks the 40^th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, the centennial of Futurism, and the quadricentennial of the Newtonian telescope. Over the last year, major art museums have presented exhibitions of visionary design and architecture [2], meant to reignite that spark of collective imagination that the 20^th century saw via world fairs [3], the formation of international space agencies, and the promise of better living through technology.

Among the surveys was the Whitney Museum of American Art’s 2008 exhibition, Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe. Viewers familiar with Fuller’s pragmatic geodesic domes and octet truss structures were introduced to his lesser-known concepts for tomorrow’s cities, like Dome over Manhattan (Midtown Manhattan acclimatized by a 2-mile diameter glass dome); Cloud Nine (a spherical cloud city that could levitate an entire community), and Triton City (a modular seastead for 100,000 inhabitants). Despite having a hallucinatory, science fiction veneer, these proposals were serious enough to be examined by agencies like the U.S Department of Housing and Urban Development, which commissioned the study for Triton City, and, along with the U.S. Navy, approved the design.

If one of Fuller’s futuristic communities had been realized, it would not have been the first time that science fiction became science fact. In 1945, author, inventor and futurist Arthur C. Clarke predicted geostationary communications satellites, some 15 years ahead of NASA’s launch of Echo, the agency’s first experimental communications satellite project [4]. In 1941, Isaac Asimov popularized the term “robotics” in his short story, Liar, over three decades before Carnegie Mellon University founded The Robotics Institute in 1979. Aldous Huxley foresaw cloning decades before Dolly the sheep was made incarnate (again), and countless other authors and artists envisioned technological milestones – from the creation of the atomic bomb to nanotechnology – and their social implications in advance of their manifestation.

It’s not so easy to instill in the public the same brand of wonder and nationalist pride that the Space Race evoked from 1958 to 1975. One seismic shift of late has been the redirection of major scientific exploration from countries to private corporations and citizens [5]. Unbridled individual potential is one outcome of the information age, but so is ambient fear of the future. A 2002 Time Magazine poll revealed that 30 percent of its respondents believed that the world would end within their lifetimes. The work in this exhibition corresponds to the other 70 percent of the population that is optimistic despite the massive challenges faced by civilization [6]. These artists seize technologies that provide unprecedented platforms for collaboration, and new ways of visualizing and representing reality. Theirs is a moment of fluid exchanges between artistic and scientific disciplines, and cooperation among private and public institutions, toward the realization of a possible future.

– Andrea Grover, Curator, 29 Chains to the Moon

Open_Sailing is a multi-disciplinary international team led by Cesar Harada and Hiromi Ozaki that is revolutionizing the concept of seasteading and social production of ideas and technologies. The Open_Sailing prototype is a “living architecture” at sea, composed of multiple dwellings, ocean farming modules, and an amoeba-like design that can expand and contract, based on the existence of calculated risks. “Open_Sailing acts like a superorganism, a cluster of intelligent units that can react to their environment, change shape and reconfigure themselves. They talk to each other. They’re modular, re-pluggable, pre-broken, post-industrial.” The concept for Open_Sailing came from creating a geography of fear – a world “potential threat map” that highlighted the centers of greatest risk (pandemics, high-human density, recent violent conflicts, hypothetical nuclear fall-outs, tsunami risk, potential exposure to rising sea level, and so on), to determine the safest areas on Earth, which happened to be at sea. Open_Sailing was awarded the 2009 Prix Ars
an> Electronica in “THE NEXT IDEA” category, and is underway with construction of an advanced prototype for their floating laboratory. www.opensailing.net

Stephanie Smith’s projects span the worlds of architecture, art, technology, and culture. Her research into the social practices of fringe and nomadic societies yielded a movement she calls Wanna Start a Commune?, and include diagrams for creating modern Cul-de-Sac Communes, portable kiosks for non-monetary exchange and meet-ups, and most recently an online platform for creating as many communes as your life demands, (www.wecommune.com). Smith says that the impetus for these projects was to counter the assumption that being green means consuming green products; instead she wanted to revive the best parts of the commune concept (a community where resources are shared) and “bring collective attitude to places where it doesn’t yet exist.” Smith is also the founder of Ecoshack, a design experiment that began in Joshua Tree, CA and is now an LA-based design studio inspired by the ad hoc, indigenous and archetypal typologies typically found at the fringes of society and culture. In 2008, the Whitney Museum identified Smith as the designer/entrepreneur most actively taking the ideas of Buckminster Fuller into the 21st century. www.stephaniesmithsofar.wordpress.com

Mitchell Joachim [jo-ak-um] is a Co-Founder at Terreform ONE and Terrefuge. He earned a Ph.D. at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MAUD at Harvard University, M.Arch. at Columbia University, and BPS at SUNY Buffalo with Honors. He currently serves on the faculty at Columbia University and Parsons and formerly worked as an architect at Gehry Partners and Pei Cobb Freed. He has been awarded the Moshe Safdie Research Fellowship and the Martin Family Society Fellow for Sustainability at MIT. He won the History Channel and Infiniti Design Excellence Award for the City of the Future and Time Magazine’s “Best Invention of the Year 2007” for Compacted Car with MIT Smart Cities. His project on view at the Miller Gallery, Fab Tree Hab, has been exhibited at MoMA and widely published. He was selected by Wired magazine for “The 2008 Smart List: 15 People the Next President Should Listen To.” www.archinode.com

Terreform ONE is a non-profit philanthropic design collaborative that integrates ecological principles in the urban environment. The group views ecology in design as not only a philosophy that inspires visions of sustainability and social justice but also a focused scientific endeavor. The mission is to ascertain the consequences of fitting a project within our natural world setting. Solutions range from green master planning, urban self-sufficiency infrastructures, community development activities, climatic tall buildings, performative material technologies, and smart mobility vehicles for cities. These design iterations seek an activated ecology both as a progressive symbol and an evolved artifact. www.terreform.org

SPECIAL READING ROOM WITH MATERIALS FEATURING

The Buckminster Fuller
Institute
Lowry Burgess, Space Artist and CMU Professor
International Space University
The Seasteading Institute

~~~~~~

Andrea Grover is an independent curator, artist and writer. In 1998, she founded Aurora Picture Show, a now recognized center for filmic art that began in her living room as “the world’s most public home theater.” She curated the first exhibition exploring the phenomenon of crowdsourcing in art (Phantom Captain, apexart, New York, 2006), and, with artist Jon Rubin, organized an exhibit in which worldwide participants created a photo-sharing album of their imaginings on Tehran (Never Been to Tehran, Parkinggallery, Tehran, Iran, 2008) She recently curated screenings for both Dia Art Foundation, New York, and The Menil Collection, Houston. 29 Chains to the Moon continues her research into cooperation and distributed thinking across disciplines. www.andreagrover.com

29 Chains to the Moon: Artists’ Schemes for a Fantastic Future
Guest curated by Andrea Grover
Organized by Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University
Aug. 28 – Dec. 6, 2009
Sept. 11, Fri. 6-8pm: Reception

Artists include: Terreform ONE (Mitchell Joachim, Maria Aiolova, Landon Young, Javier Arbona, Lara Greden), Open_Sailing, Stephanie Smith, more

About the Exhibition
In 1938, the visionary designer R.Buckminster Fuller wrote Nine Chains to the Moon, his radical proposal for improving the quality of life for all humankind via progressive design and maximization of the world’s finite resources. The title was a metaphor for cooperation–if all of humankind stood on each others’ shoulders we could complete nine chains to the moon. Today, the population of the planet has increased more than three times (we could now complete 29 chains to the moon), and the successful distribution of energy, food, and shelter to over 9 billion humans by 2050 requires some fantastic schemes. Like Fuller’s revelation from five decades earlier, 29 Chains to the Moon features artists who put forth radical proposals, from seasteads and micronations to floating cities, to make the world work for everyone.

IMAGES:
Fab Tree Hab, Terreform ONE
Open_Sailing model, Open_Sailing

Buckminster Fuller

This letter was sent to Buckminster Fuller on November 19, 1982, nine months before his death (from the book Buckminster Fuller: Anthology for the New Millennium edited by Thomas T.K. Zung). The letter and Fuller’s response choke me up every time.

Dear Buckminster Fuller:

My last grandmother died recently, as expected, but I didn’t expect to remember so much I forgot to talk with her about, and I’m a bit blue when I think of her. She was born about the time when you were, and since your death soon could not be called unexpected, I want to send you a note of appreciation.

Insofar as I represent the generation twice removed from yours (younger in human terms, older in Universe time), I want to thank you on behalf of all of us, for a life well done. There’s no question that you will be better known in fifty years than you are now, because every year your ideas, language, and general optimism appear to become more saturated in the collective consciousness.

You have know the stagecoach, yet remain on the cutting edge of the electronic age. You are so wonderfully arranged that I can be assured that you will read this letter. How you come to God, I don’t understand, but God bless you.

Love,

Joe [Joseph Wheelwright]

Dear Joe,

There have been two generations of Wheelwright friends in the first half of my life. They were all admirable individuals. I interpret your spontaneous writing to me in so daringly tender a way as a message of comprehension and accord from all those whom I love who have died and in my youth were so often dismayed and alarmed by all the mistakes I had to make to become shocked into discovering what I had to learn. This was to thoughtfully discover on my own, in both the biggest and most exquisite ways, what needed to be done, and could now be done for the first time in history to make the world work for everybody. It was a task that required a special-case individual to initiate, and individual who had come to the point of suicide and was inspired to commit his total experience inventory only to the advantage of all others but self.

There’s lots more to be done, which it seems to me I have to do before I die, as a follow-through in accomplishing all that with which I committed myself to cope. I never pray God to do anything, because God would not be God if the eternal, absolute intellectual competence needed my suggestions.

I  feel sure that God holds you in grace and will continue to do so. I thank God for an additional Wheelwright friend.

Faithfully yours,

Buckminster Fuller